A Ghost turning into a Vampire

The Concept of Capital and Living Labour

Riccardo Bellofiore
Department of Economics ‘Hyman P. Minsky’
Faculty of Economics
University of Bergamo, Italy
riccardo.bellofiore@unibg.it

Research Associate
History and Methodology of Economics Group
Faculty of Economics and Econometrics
University of Amsterdam

Abstract

The first part of the paper makes a personal survey of some foundational
approaches to Marx which have been relevant in shaping my reading of Capital,
both on the issue of Marx and Hegel and on the notion of abstract labour.
The second part of the paper summarizes my interpretation of Marx based on the
essentiality of the notion of money as a commodity, and then my reconstruction of
the critical political economy in a monetary circuit setting without commodity
money.
The third part takes the special question of the monetary expression of labour time
as a case study of the consequences of different readings of Marx, and engage in
a dialogue and criticism of Moseley’s position.
Each part is the logical prerequisite of what follows.
 2
A Ghost turning into a Vampire
The Concept of Capital and Living Labour

Riccardo Bellofiore
Department of Economics ‘Hyman P. Minsky’
Faculty of Economics
University of Bergamo, Italy
riccardo.bellofiore@unibg.it

Research Associate
History and Methodology of Economics Group
Faculty of Economics and Econometrics
University of Amsterdam

Once again, the self-pitying will bewail the fact that

‘Marxists are arguing amongst themselves’, that tried
and tested ‘authorities’ are being contested. But Marxism
is not a dozen people who ascribe the right to ‘expert
knowledge’ to each other and before whom the mass of
faithful Moslems must prostrate themselves in blind
trust. Marxism is a revolutionary world outlook which
must always strive for new discoveries, which more than
anything else dislikes formulations valid once and forever,
and whose living force is best preserved in the clash of
self-criticism and in the lights and thunders rough of
history.
Rosa Luxemburg, my Italics

1. Introduction

This paper puts “Marx in question” mainly on four issues: the relationship of
Marx with Hegel, the meaning of abstract labour, the notion of exploitation, and
the integration of money and value. In fact, these four points are those which were
most debated in the last 40-50 years, and; as I will try to show, are different
facets of the same issue.
A very widespread opinion is that the Marxian theory of value fails to derive
individual prices (cfr. the followers of Sraffa), it is a kind of real analysis failing
to integrate money (cfr. Benetti & Cartelier), and it is based on an Hegelian
methodology which is seen as a liability (cfr. the post-1976 Colletti). More
recently, it has also been added that the real development of capitalism makes
Marx obsolete, because of Post-Fordism (end of work), globalization
(dominance of the market and finance), the new economy (disappearance of
abstract labour).
My conclusions are radically different, and point towards a view of Marxian
critical political economy as a macro-social foundation of the evolutionary dynamics
of capitalism, of the critique of political economy as firmly based on the notion of
totality and real abstraction, and on the idea that contemporary capitalism as
 3
incomprehensible outside a reference to abstract labour and the centrality of
production.
Even though my aim is to reinstate the (abstract, human) labour theory of
value as a sound monetary theory of exploitation, I will argue that Marx’s own
formulation runs into some trouble (though not for the usual charges against
him). Thus, the moment of the interpretation of what Marx actually wrote must
be distinguished from the moment of reconstruction of the project of a Marxian
critical political economy. Interpretation and reconstruction will however in this
paper put into the larger context

2. Marx after Hegel: Capital as a Totality and the Centrality of Production

The first part of my argument, in this and next paragraph, relates to some
methodological and foundational aspects of the Marxian legacy. The general
perspective is the following: Marx’s life-work must be read from the
perspective of Capital (that is: from the later Marx backwards), taking into account
that Marx’s understanding of his own works lags far behind what he offers in his
theory, and that he more and more tried to conceal his dialectical method (Reichelt).
So, while we have to go ‘backwards’, we also have to move forward, at least in
this sense: that Das Kapital needs also to be read giving a crucial position to the
suggestions coming from the rough-draft 1857-8 (Grundrisse) and the various
versions of the beginning of K1 (especially the 1859 book and the first chapter in
the first edition), where the Hegelian background is much more evident.
Once again the most developed is the key for the knowledge of the less developed,
but we have also to understand the genesis of Marx’s exposition of the concept
of capital. In this opening paragraph, I shall do this with a kind of a compressed
and oriented survey of some key contributions on tyhe relationship between
Marx and Hegel which has been crucial in shaping my own view.
Let us start with this question: what is the meaning of the expression critique
of political economy? In Capital the ultimate object of knowledge is the
contemporary social phenomenon as a whole (capital as totality): but not as an
immediate object, i.e. as the empirically given conditions of production. Marx
rather proceeds through a critique of bourgeois categories and theories. It is in this
inner connection of objects and concepts that it is possibile to see, as Alfred
Schmidt proposed in the mid-60s, a first role of the dialectics and then of Hegel in
Marx: what he labels as a a ‘weak ontology’ perspective. Since there is an
ultimate irreducibility of the ‘real’ object to the object of analysis, the method of
presentation is radically different from the method of inquiry. More than that: the
logical course is opposite to the historical course. We have to go from immediate being
to mediating essence.
Outward appearance, however, departs from hidden essence, though it is not
possibile to divorce the two: essence must appear, and this appearance is not
mere semblance. The point is that appearance, while exhibiting the essence, at the
same time distorts it. It is here that we have a second role of dialectics, and hence a
second influence of Hegel on Marx, according to Roberto Finelli: dialectiscs as
dissimulation.
 4
As a totality, capital has to be known as a concept, and hence through a
systematic exposition. This latter starts with simple and abstract categories, and
then it develops into more and more complex notions, which are also more
concrete. This movement may be described as ‘concretion’. It lies here a third role
of dialectics, and therefore a further point of view about the relationship of Marx
to Hegel. Dialectics is here seen first of all as systematic dialectics: more or less,
this outlook is the one taken by Geert Reuten. Along this line, categories (and,
most importantly, the same value) need to be (and are actually) redefined again
and again at each successive stage, or layer, of Marx’s theoretical development of
the concept capital. There are then in Capital many conceptual conversions or
‘transformations’. The comprehension of the (more complex and) concrete inform the
(more simple and) abstract. So, for example, the categories of Volume I are not
‘final’, in a sense each of them must be re-read in the light of the further
development of the argument. Since the latter has remained unfinished business,
this interpretation of Marx opens to a ‘non-orthodox’ reconstruction and ‘open’
attitude.
All these three approaches to dialectics are correct. I think however there is
something more, without which Marx cannot be fully understood. Something,
moreover, which has very often been seen as a source of embarrassment in the
Marxian camp. It was well understood by Lucio Colletti in 1969, in the last
chapter of Marxism and Hegel. Hegel’s Logic – Colletti wrote - is the logic of
capital, is the logic of the Christian-bourgeois world. The commodity is truly a
mystical entity, value is in fact a metaphysical notion. Capitalism cannot be
understood without putting at the core of the capitalist process the dynamics of
the abstraction of labour as a process of a real hypostatization actually going on in
reality. As Claudio Napoleoni soon realized, this is something which pertains
not only to (generalized) exchange, where more or less Colletti stops. The process
of abstraction in exchange is the end-point of a process of real hypostatization
which is more fundamental, and affecting the capitalist ‘social relations of
production’, the real subsumption). Capitalism is a topsy-turvy, inverted, upside-
down reality. Why?
To understand this, two other methodological points must be added to what
has been said. First point: the clear (though implicit) methodological standpoint
in Capital is the so-called circle of presupposition-posit (Finelli again). This means
that the presupposition of the result is posited by the result itself, in a spiral.
What at first appear as subjective and mental abstractions are rather posited by
the argument as objective and real abstractions.
A good example is exactly the crucial notion of abstract labour (on this I will
expand in paragraph 3). In the first chapter this latter seems just something
deduced from exchange as such, and the value form itself appear to be
grounded in generalized exchange. It is at this level of argument that the first
three chapters introduce money (as the universal equivalent). But it is possible to
show that abstract labour is by Marx eventually posited as wage-labour, when
this latter is really subsumed under capital – that is, when the same properties
of the concrete and useful labours are shaped by capital, and the ‘matter’ of
labour itself becomes form-determined. Wage labour is forced labour (of free
subjects! an absolute historical novelty) and it is other-directed labour (as the
 5
labour ‘commanded’ through an organizational and technological capitalist
system giving social form to the labour process).
Another good example is the relationship between money and (surplus-
)value production (to which I will return later in paragraph 4-8). Of course, this
relationship cannot be theorized in the first three chapters. The discourse on
money is taken up again by Marx in Volume II and III; and as a consequence,
the same categorical structure of its nature (and of its value) must be re-thought
taking into account the issue of finance . More generally, the real subsumption of
labour to capital and abstract labour have to be grounded in a macro view
where the (expected) expenditure of the living labour of the wage worker, as
labour tentatively producing (more) money as the universal equivalent, strictly
depends from the differential access to money as (bank-)finance by the two
fundamental classes of capitalist society.
Second methodological point to be added. The methodological spiral of the
positing of the presupposition is adequate because, ontologicall,y, capital is self-
valorizing value. Chris Arthur has convincingly shown that capital as value
begetting value mimics Hegel’s Absolute Idea: it is the constant drive to actualize
and reproduce its entire conditions of existence. To be self-grounded, value must be
produced by value. But dead labour cannot produce more dead labour. What is
needed, therefore, as both Chris Arthjur and myself have (at first
independently) asserted since many years, is that capital ‘internalizes’ in
production the same human activity which only may turn less dead labour into
more dead labour. Indeed, the only ‘other’ to dead labour cannot but be living
labour. This making of the workers an internal other is possible because the
worker is the bearer of labour-power, which, in turn, is nothing but potential
living labour. The potentiality to work becomes a commodity bought and sold
on the (labour-)market – and the worker is attached to it as its human appendix.
As pure form, Arthur stresses, capital ‘spins in the void’. True reality is
material. But if capital must make workers its internal other, on their side
workers may cooperate or may resist. Paradoxically enough, the value-
productivity of the wage-earners, and the same Marxian fundamental theorem
according to which the new ‘value added’ in the period is the monetary exhibition of
nothing but current living labour, depends precisely on this potential counter-
productivity of the working class.
If, however, I am right in this reasoned survey, the point where Marx comes
nearer to Hegel in his dialectical exposition is exactly the point where the criticism
of Hegel is at its highest. The process of ‘abstraction’ refers to the complex
structure of the argument going towards further and further concretion (Reuten),
but also to abstraction as a real occurrence, as real hypostasis (Colletti), which
becomes ‘true’ only with real subsumption, when form-determination makes
matter a content adequate to the form. Along this line of reading Marx, the positing
of the presupposition is not only a logical method (Finelli) but, also and foremost,
an ontological feature of capitalism (Arthur). Quoting Raffaele Sbardella, one may
summarize this view saying that capital is the Abstract in Motion. More
precisely, it is the Totality where the antagonistic social relation of production
between capital and labour (on the labour market and in the capitalist labour
process) is at its centre. In my view, this the sense in which ‘production’ is the
center of the concept of capital.
 6
In a recent book Roberto Fineschi has put forward – in a perspective that
again stresses Marx’s method of positing the presupposition - other four points
which I find extremely useful in clarifying the way to go both in interpreting
and reconstructing Marx. First, he points out that the ‘content’ which moves the
exposition of Capital is the commodity – that is, it is neither the substance of value
nor the form of value alone, but rather the contradictory polarities of value and
use value and its development. Second, if in Marx the movement goes from
‘content’ to ‘form’, but the content is always, in a sense, already form-determined.
Third, the (immanent) measure of value is (socially necessary) labour time: this
latter is the socially objective dimension of the magnitude to be measured; but the
true measuring act which ‘fixes’ this objective magnitude is only the ‘final’
exchange on the commodity market, where there happens the metamorphosis of
the commodity with money as the measuring rod. Fourth, Fineschi reminds the
crucial notion of ‘ordinary’ demand. Thus, socially necessary labour time is not
simply defined by the average techniques but by the satisfaction of the social need
within the particular branch of production. We may add that the average technique
itself does not exist independently from this influence of demand, which
however can only affect which amount of the potential value which is latent in
the commodity actually comes into being.
In my view, these observations allow a radical conclusion: though the
concept of capital as a totality is at each time re-defined at the different layers of
the argument in Capital, given ‘ordinary’ demand, the ‘value’ macro-class analysis
of the extraction of living labour and of its distribution between the entire
capitalist class and the working class remains unaffected. (Surplus-)value
production is demand-driven, while the actual extraction of living labour depends
on class struggle in production (and on all the factors affecting it). Once the
analysis is framed so that short-term expectations by firms on effective demand are
assumed to be confirmed, expected value is actualized value – this of course is
quite compatible with radical long-term shifts in demand, and with the
periodical eruption of crises. Again in this sense, the Marxian analysis of the
immediate process of surplus value production in Volume I of Capital remains
the fundamental core of the economic analysis of capitalism.

3. The embodiment of a ghost: the abstraction of labour as a process

More or less to the same conclusions we come if we take another route, that is if
we consider some key contributions on the notion of abstract labour. As we
have already anticipated, abstract labour is not a mental generalization but a
real abstraction. It goes on daily in the ‘final’ commodity market, but also on the
labour market and immediate production. Colletti stressed the abstraction of labour
in exchange, and the fact that this abstraction amounts to a real hypostatization, i.e.
to an inversion of subject and predicate. On the commodity market, through the
exchange of things, i.e. through objectified and dead labour, what is is going is
an ‘alienation’ of the human subjectivity of the producers.
A much richer analysis was the one that Claudio Napoleoni presented as an
extension of Colletti’s line of thought. It was based on the re-reading of the
process of real hypostatization in all the phases of the capitalist circuit before the
 7
final exchange on the commodity market. Napoleoni held that on the labour
market the worker has to be seen as an appendix of the commodity he sells, labour-
power: an instance, again, of inversion subject-predicate. Something similar
may be said about what is happening in the capitalist labour process. When we
reach the stage of the real subsumption of labour to capital, living labour not
only counts as abstract, says Marx, but it is abstract. Note that on this view the
properties of labour, hence its characteristics as concrete and useful labour, are
form-determined. The content of labour cannot be divorced by the form, even as
concrete labour. This statement has now a correspondence in the same
‘material’ reality. Note also that, though the wage-earner as seller and as
worker in capitalism has to reduced to an appendix of labour-power and of
labour as value-producing activity, the capacity to work and living labour
cannot but remain ‘attached’ to the worker as human being (in social relations).
Napoleoni is important also for another conclusion. He clarifies that we have
in Marx two deductions of abstract labour: one from exchange as such, one from
capitalist production. But the two, he says, are not alternative or contradictory.
They are in fact one and the same. It is so because the exchange of commodities
becomes general only in capitalism. Thus, abstract labour is not only immediately
private labour which has to become social through exchange; it is also, and at the
same time, the living labour of the wage worker organized by capitals in
competition. In fact, the ‘immediately private labours’ of the beginning of
Capital Volume I must be re-read as individual capitalist firms struggling
against each other.
A similar point was made in the ‘20s by Isaak Ilyich Rubin. He saw that the
abstraction of labour was a process. As activity, labour is ‘in motion’, ‘in
becoming’. As values, the commodities are the ‘solidification’ by freezing (a
gelation) of this labour. Hence, the abstract features of labour, when labour is
living labour, are there, but only latently, and when labour is objectified in the
commodity only ideally. Rubin rightly stresses that when Marx makes abstract
labour dependent from exchange, this must actually be read not just as a
reference to the final exchange of commodities on the market, but rather as a
reference to the whole capitalist circuit, as a totality including production and
circulation. ‘Exchange’, in this sense, is the form of the social production and
reproduction process. And again, Rubin saw very well that in this approach the
movement is from the inner content to the outer form. Of course, as we have said
in the prior paragraph, a content which is already form-determined –:the
‘spiral’ of the positing of the presupposition once again. On this Rubin is not
very clear: his superiority on Napoleoni is on not reducing living labour as
activity and value-as-result as an identity; his inferiority is in not seeing clearly
enough that the labour producing for general exchange is wage and capitalist
labour.
However, in the next paragraphs, I shall show that there is a problem here.
Recent debates have conclusively shown that if the accent on the abstraction of
labour is put only on the exchange in the final market, as most value-form
theorists do, the conclusion is either of evacuating labour altogether (Eldred) or of
reducing the reference to labour in production only to concrete labour (Reuten).
More than that: as the debate with the Sraffians has clarified, labour in
production before final exchange is of course heterogeneous. The only way to
 8
rescue the Napoleoni-Rubin line is to radicalize it so that that living labour in
production is already tentatively social thanks to some monetary ante-validation.
This latter needs to be grounded in a view of the capitalist sequence as an
essentially monetary circuit in an endogenous money approach, with money seen
first of all as bank finance to production (Graziani, Bellofiore).
The abstraction of labour can be asserted only if the deduction of abstract
labour is extended so that ‘finance’, and finance granted by the banking system
to the capitalist firm sector, becomes essential in Marxian critical political
economy. But this is the same as saying that when we develop a full analysis of
the capitalist cycle of money capital money must necessarily be seen as
essentially non-commodity money. As I shall shaw in the next paragraph, this
breaks with Marx’s original formulation. Moreover, in the alternative monetary
perspective, where money as (bank-)finance is crucial, money not only passively
exhibits value ex post (as in Marx), it also and fundamentally constitutes value
ex-ante.

4. Money as a commodity and the abstract labour theory of value

Taking stock of the debate I have been following in the preceding paragraphs, I
will concentrate in this paragraph on the interpretation of some aspects of
Capital, Volume I.
For Marx value eventually comes into being on the commodity market, with
the form of value necessarily including a reference to money as a commodity. The
value of a commodity, before this latter is sold, counts merely as ideal money.
To become actual value it needs to turn into real money in the final circulation of
commodities. Though the act of measurement is going on only on the commodity
market, and hence though the external measuring rod is nothing but money, the
substance of value to be exhibited in money is nothing but homogeneous and
abstract labour – better, labour which is homogeneous because it is abstract. It is
in this meaning that Marx speaks of an ‘intrinsic’ value, and sometimes even of
an ‘absolute’ value, whose immanent ‘measure’ is labour time, if expended in the
socially necessary amount. The socially necessary labour time (SNLT)
constituting value, however, is not just a ‘technical’ average, because the
sociality of private labours , and so the same magnitude to be measured is
eventually fixed in market exchange. Thus, SNLT is known only ex post.
The key point here is the ‘unity’ of production and circulation, so that
abstract labour is both something presupposed to, and something fully actualized,
only within final exchange (A Contribution). Commodities are exchanged with
money because – Marx says - they are already commensurable. As values
,commodities counts as objectified abstract human labour: and they counts as
objectified abstract human labour because they are ex ante ideal money, and
because money is a commodity produced by labour. As such, as objectified
abstract human labour, values are the pre-conditions of the equalization going on
in exchange. But abstract labour, Marx adds, is achieved only in actual exchange,
when commodities as ideal money turns into real money.
Very often this point – abstract labour both as a precondition and as a result
of final exchange – has been seen as a contradiction in Marxian critical political
 9
economy. On the contrary, it has to be stressed that in Marx the analysis is quite
consistent, but precisely because of his theory of money as a commodity.
Commodities, as crystals of abstract labour, have to be represented or exhibited by
the concrete labour producing money as a commodity, as the universal equivalent.
Since capital is indeed ‘money begetting money’, and money is (directly or
indirectly) gold produced by labour, money has for Marx a given labour content
when it enters the monetary circuit – and this of course means it has a
determinate ‘value of money’ given to this latter at the point of inflow into the
circuit. It is because of this that the monetary expression of labour can be taken
as a given.
As a consequence of what has just been said, it is also obvious that constant
capital and variable capital are money magnitudes which can be expressed at the
same time, and necessarily, as labour quantities. This amounts to a criticism of the
correlative errors of unilaterality in the interpretation of Marx made by Moseley
(stressing the labour quantities contained in the commodities), on one side, and
Reuten (stressing the monetary exhibition), on the other. The (ideal, and not
only the real) money value of output cannot but be accounted as nothing but
crystals of abstract human labour. Geert Reuten, for example, rightly stresses that
«without exception the value entities are expressed in monetary terms (£); the
same applies to all numerical examples». But he soon adds: «It is necessary to
emphasize this since in some accounts of Marx's theory ‘value’ is itself taken to
have a labour-time dimension». In fact, since for Marx money is a commodity
produced by labour, and abstract labour is represented in the concrete labour of
money as a commodity, there is absolutely no contradiction between the fact
that ‘values’ are expressed in monetary terms and at the same time they have a
labour-time dimension too. Of course the two things in this theory are one and
the same.
Exploitation can thus be portrayed by Marx as the outcome of what is
happening on the labour market and within immediate production, even before the
final exchange on the commodity market – these two are the moments which
together account for the ‘social relations of production’.
In Volume I (and II) of Capital, however, two major assumption rules that
justify these results: (i) supply is equal to demand; (ii) commodities exchange at
simple or direct prices, so that relative exchange ratios are proportional to the
labour ‘congealed’ in those commodities. Thanks only to these assumptions –
and, of course, to the monetary theory of value which sees in value nothing but
a monetary expression of (living) labour as congealed in commodities - the
origin of surplus value is genetically accounted thanks to something akin to a
method of comparison. The first step of it is the situation where living labour is
supposed to be expended in an amount equal to necessary labour. The second step
is the prolongation of living labour in excess of necessary labour. The first
situation, though hypothetical, portrays something real and relevant for any
capitalist economy (thus Croce was wrong), and helps to define the value of
labour power as the labour required to produce the means of subsistence. The
second situation makes surplus value the uncertain outcome of the extraction of
living labour from workers, and thus ultimately grounds the claim that only
living labour objectifies as the ‘substance’ of value. This last point however is
actually implicit in Marx (who wrongly thought he had justified the refernce of
 10
value to labour in the first chapter) and should be beter seen as a moment in the
reconstruction.
Some points need to be underlined. In this argument, even when analysing
the origin of value and surplus value, Marx cannot abstract from circulation. This
is due to the fact that he has to take into account the buying and selling of labour
power as a commodity before the capitalist labour process - that is, he has to
explain the exchange value of labour power, and thereby how the subsistence
level of the wage is set. It is only thanks to this that he can, afterwards, compare
the exchange value of labour power (exhibiting necessary labour) with its use
value (labour ‘in becoming’, which, once objectified, is the substance of value as
ideal money). Marx has also to assume that the value which is ideally present
in the commodity will eventually be confirmed as social use value on the final
exchange in the market. More than that, he has to assume that the
metamorphosis of the commodity with money will happen in the expected
quantitative amount, so that the abstract labour ideally objectified in the
commodity will be fully expressed by the (immediately) social concrete labour
producing money as a commodity.
Though he cannot ever abstract from circulation, he must and does have to
abstract in Volume I (and II) from the tendency to the equalisation of the rate of
profits between industries. This is necessary to make transparent the relationship
between human labour power as the only source of living labour, the fluid
which ‘materializes’ in congealed shape as value, and this value itself. That is
why the analysis of the constitution of capital must be put forward in terms of
‘simple prices’. At the same time, even though Marx has to abstract from ‘static’
competition to explain how capital is produced before explaining how capital
produces, he cannot fully abstract from the struggle of capitals to gain extra surplus
value, hence from the diversification and stratification through entrepreneurial
innovation, i.e. from ‘dynamic’ competition.
Since Marx in Volume I takes the real wage (of the working class) as given at the
subsistence level, this produce a tendential fall of the ‘relative wage (Luxemburg)’,
within an approach where the rate of accumulation is the independent variable, and
the labour supply is (partly) endogenously generated and influenced by labour demand.
In Capital, Volumes II and III, Marx: (i) defines the abstract possibility of inter-
sectoral equilibrium (which is neither a fully spelled crisis theory nor a theory
of balanced reproduction); (ii) derives individual capitalist prices, embodying a
uniform rate of profit with a third step of his method of comparison, where the
average rate of profit is defined as the total surplus value over the total value of
capital (but he does not transform the inputs, as he should do, as a fourth step);
(iii) puts forward several crisis theories (disproportionality, underconsumption,
tendential fall in the rate of profits), without integrating them, as I think it to be
possible in reconstrunction.
This theoretical building, as it stands in Marx, does not work. Several effective
criticisms has been offered. The identification of value with the monetary
representation of only labour (Boehm-Bawerk) is just one: it is ultimately
wrong, of course, but Marx made it a reasonable rebuttal to his argument
because of the ambiguities of the first chapter of Capital, and his concealing of the
dialectics and the relationship with Hegel. The fact that Marx didn’t ‘ended’ the
transformation of prices into values is another problem: in simultaneous
 11
determination, simple prices appears to be redundant (this is the opinion of the
follower of the surplus approach, but not of Sraffa): of course this is due to the
obfuscation of the role of the abstract labour theory of value in constituting the
economic magnitudes, where it is really essential.
The real problem however is the one I put forward at the end of paragraph 3.
If abstract labour actually exists only in final exchange, then labours in
production are only concrete, then heterogeneous, and only the monetary
dimension is truly social, but then there is no need for the notion of socially
necessary labour, and of the reference to time (the value form approach, but not
Rubin).

5. A macro-monetary reconstruction of the abstract labour theory of value

In this parapraph I summarize some of the main lines of my reconstruction

of Marx. This reconstruction is based on the following principles: (i) it is a
macroeconomic, class and monetary reading of the capitalist circuit; (ii) the stress is
moved on the phases of the cycle of capital which precedes the ‘final’ exchange
on the commodity market; (iii) both money and abstract labour are seen as
diachronic concepts which are ‘in motion’, perpetually in becoming; (iv) the bank
money opening the circuit is without value, in the sense of not being a
commodity produced by labour.
Capitalism is a monetary sequence without any reference to money as a
commodity – at least once the analysis of the capitalist circuit is completed
(hints of this perspective already in Vol. III). Logically, there is an essential
temporal dynamics within the perio defining the circuit, even though the
relationship between prices and distribution at the end of the circuit is to be
conceived as simultaneous when studying the equilibrium of reproduction.
The total money wage, as we have said, is ruled by the subsistence wage. The
value of labour power is fixed by social conflict (Luxemburg), just like class
struggle contributes to determines the length and intensity of the working day.
The money wage bill is advanced to firms by the banking sector (Wicksell and
Keynes’ Treatise on Money). This finance is ex-nihilo, and has to be read at the
same time as finance to production and finance to innovation(Schumpeter).
This initial finance is expectations-based. These expectations are by firms,
banks, workers. Firms ask finance on some guesses about the success in
compelling workers to work, and about the realization (better, actualization) of their
value-output on the commodity market. This bets are submitted to banks, which
select firms (Schumpeter again, but also Stiglitz). This amounts to a monetary
ante-validation of production, and then also of the expenditure of labour. The
banking system is in fact ruling a system of social accountancy, so that giving
finance to firms banks are emitting ex-ante ‘sanctions’ of the sociality of the
concrete and useful labours to be employed by firms, as well as granting the
expectations of gross money profits. Also workers bargain their money wage having
in mind a target real wage.
Marx’s two major assumptions in ‘pure’ theory amounts to the idea that both
workers’ expectation and firms’ short-term expectations are met: no injustice in
exchange explains systematically the emergence of gross money profits, and in
 12
the short-term supply is driven by expected (and realized) demand. Because of the
assumption about the total real wage, bank-finance, though without value in itself,
can be ‘translated’ in a certain amount of labour-power. If the joint expectations
about valorization in production by firms and banks are also met, the labour-
power bought gives origin to the expected flux of living labour, and then of
value congealed as ‘ideal’ money. As long as short-term expectations about the
actualization of value are confirmed, this ideal money becomes real money in
the same amount, and the SNLT is the one actually expended in production.
On this last point, I shall return in the next paragraph. For now I simply want
to stress that once to the reference to ordinary demand is added an assumption
like the one we find in Keynes’ General Theory – namely, that short-term
expectations concerning immediate prices, sales, costs et al., are always realised
and are independent of long-term expectations (Kregel) – my reconstruction is
such that exploitation is (both qualitatively and quantitatively) defined
exactly as in Volume I of Capital. In other words, it is determined by what
happens in the articulation of the labour market (moment of circulation,
ruled by the subsistence class real wage – necessary labour going back to all
the workers) and the process of production (moment of the immediate
valorization, ruled by the antagonism between capital and the working class in
production on the extraction of living labour).
Note also that because of the way the theory is constructed, the class
distribution depends ultimately from social relations of production defined by this
articulation, and it is adequately analyzed by a reasoning in ‘values’ – that is: a
shift from simple prices to prices of production definitely does not change the class
relationship between capitalists and workers. From this point of view, what the
so-called transformation of exchange values into prices of production simply
does is just to conceal (i.e., dissimulate) the real state of affairs. Even though the
working class get the same wage in use values, requiring always the same given
amount of labour time to be produced, the sellers of those use values are able to
command in circulation more or less labour than contained in commodities. This
determines a divorce between paid and unpaid labour from the necessary and the
surplus labour required to produce profit-goods and wage-goods.
The logic here is ‘macro’, as in most recent approaches to Marx. But here,
differently from these new approaches, class division is basic in discriminating
the same access to money, and the model is monetary from the start: money is not
only (as universal equivalent) crucial after production has been accomplished, it is
also necessary (as bank finance) to start production and to determine the
composition of output and employment. In this reconstruction of critical political
economy – and this again is a difference relative to most of the new macro-
monetary approaches to Marx, there is no doubt about money being necessarily
endogenous and non-neutral. This allows, as in Marx, to see the same labour in
production as something which is dual in the same moment of activity: labour is
both concrete (as the collective worker organized by capital, with specific
properties) and latently abstract (i.e., as labour tentatively producing money and
more money, manipulated and other-directed by a capitalist will and design).
Note, however, that – as in Arthur – in my view the identification of the
money (new) value added in the period with a representation of only (living)
current labour (of the wage workers) is based on the potential counter-productivity
 13
of workers. Though they are the living bearers of labour-power, this latter is
inextricably linked to their bodies. It is this counter-productivity which is in the
last instance the justification of tracing back the new value produced in the
period to human living labour exhibited in money.

6. The value of money: a fundamentalist reading

I will isolate just one aspect of my reconstruction to see how it reaches

different conclusions compared to the ones sustained by an author among the
most rigorous and serious interpreter following a ‘fundamentalist’ reading of
Marx. The aspect I am talking about is the judgement about the essentiality or not
of money as a commodity in the Marxian theory of value. The author to whom I am
referring is Fred Moseley. The adjective ‘fundamentalist’ is used in a strict
sense: the truth of a position in Marxian economics is by this author affirmed or
denied according to its (supposed) adherence to Marx’s own textual statements in
Capital: so that, quoting Moseley himself, only “extensions” of original
arguments by Marx himself are needed, nothing more.
According to some of his recent writings by Moseley, money needs not to be
a commodity in Marx’s theory: in Capital money as a commodity is there, of
course, but it is to be interpreted just as a historical contingency. For this
interpreter, money does not need to be a commodity even in its function of
measure of value. The argument here seems to be not logical but historical, an
appeal to facts: after the 1930s, governments legalized the inevitable and
commodity-owners had no choice but to accept inconvertible paper money by
itself as the universal equivalent, and hence as the measure of value. The only
problem then, according to Moseley, is what determines the “monetary
expression of labour time” (MELT) – i.e, the quantity of money that exhibits an hour
of social labour in the economy as a whole. This latter is the inverse of the “value of
money” – i.e., the quantity of social labour which is exhibited by one unit of money.
Moseley criticizes Foley and the New Interpretation view according to which
the MELT is accounted as just an ex-post and observable measure given by the
ratio of the total money value added in a given period (MVA) to the total living labour
which has been spent in the current period (LL). Moseley rightly argues that this
empirical measure does not give a theoretical determination (a point, by the way,
which is fully recognized, by Foley). He then counters that in Marx’s theory
there is an arrow of causality according to which the MELT is taken as given, and
prices (hence, the MVA) depend on the quantities of labour contained in commodities
and money
With commodity money, the MELT is the inverse of the value of commodity
money – i.e., of the inverse of the labour time contained in a unit of gold. Hence,
the prices of commodities are proportional to the SNLT contained in them, via a
factor of proportionality given by the MELT. In this case, the amount of money
which is circulating depends from the sum of prices. So, the supply of money is
endogenous, thanks to hoarding and dishoarding. With inconvertible fiat paper
money, also analyzed by Marx, the MELT also depends on the ratio between the
quantity of paper money forced into circulation (Mp) and the quantity of gold money
which would be need if money were convertible in gold (M*), with M* given by the
 14
sum of gold prices (Pi) divided by the velocity of circulation (V). Hence, when
this ratio changes, like in the quantity theory of money, the MELT changes
proportionally. The reason of the similarity with the quantity theory of money is
clear: the supply of money is now completely exogenous, and it determines the
prices (though indirectly through the MELT).
According to Moseley, the present situation of inconvertible credit
money just requires an “extension”, or better an adaptation of Marx’s original
approach (hence the already noted fundamentalist nature of the approach),
because the determination of the MELT is essentially the same as Marx’s case of
inconvertible fiat money. The MELT in these two cases can be expressed in this
formula:

MELTp = MpV/SNLT

Or, in other terms, it is determined by the ratio of the total quantity of paper
money in circulation adjusted for velocity divided by the SNLT. The only difference is
that the MELT is now determined directly by the quantity of the paper money
(which, it is to be reminded, is exogenous).

7. A critique of Moseley on the MELT

Taking into account our interpretation and reconstruction of Marx, it is easy to

see why Moseley’s position cannot be accepted:

(i) Moseley does not even see the essential role of money as a commodity in
Marx: without it, howewer, the abstraction of labour on the market
could not be accomplished, and abstract labour would have been left in
the air. In Marx, value-as-content (or, in other terms, the abstract
labour congealed in the commodity, which is labour immediately
private and only tentatively social) cannot be actualized as value-as-form
(which gain actuality only within the exchange on the market through
the equalization of the commodity with money as a commodity
produced by concrete labour, and a labour which is then directly
social)

(ii) Of course, this means that the SNLT is really SN, or ‘socially
necessary’, only when the commodity is sold on the final commodity
market. In Marx, the product becomes a commodity when it is use
value for others, a social use value, thus – again - the SNLT is fixed
only within exchange. In other terms, the SNLT is just one: it can be
divided only conceptually in the two determinations of a technical
average (when the assumption that the output is entirely sold rules)
and of a market average (when the quantity produced may or may not
be fully sold). When ordinary demand is given, the technical
definition may be the one acting as center of gravitation of the market
definition. But when drastic changes in demand are going on, the
market determination may shift the technical average. As a
 15
consequence, the implicit assumption by Moseley that the MELT is
equal to MVA divided by SNLT in the first meaning of a technical
average (that is, as an ex ante magnitude) cannot be accepted in
general.

(iii) Therefore, Foley’s conclusion according to which LL (as SNLT)

cannot be the determinant of MVA seem the most rigorous, and
faithful to Marx, even with gold as money: SNLT must be interpreted
in general as an ex post magnitude.

(iv) How, then, to account for the fact that the MELT is taken as given by
Marx when he refers to gold as money? Looking at the textual
evidence, the answer is easy: the relative value between money and
commodities is established at the source of its production by means of
barter. As soon as it enters into circulation as money, its value is
already given.

(v) Therefore, as I showed in my paragraph 4, on the interpretation of

Capital, when Marx gives a picture of the capitalist general ‘formula
of capital’ with commodity money, the amount of initial finance in
gold (constant and variable capital) and of the the commodity output
as ideal (gold-)money can be both translated in labour quantities.

(vi) The difficulty in Moseley’s position is revealed by his necessity to

appeal to history to ground the necessity of credit money as the
essential nature of money in capitalism.

I showed in my paragraph 5, when I sketched the reconstructive moment in my

argument about Marx, that the abandonment of the view of money as a
commodity does not produce a collapse in the abstract labour theory of value,
provided a monetary ante-validation of labour is granted through banks financing
firms’ bets on valorization. The problem remains therefore to show how, in this
non-fundamentalist reconstruction, the value of money (and the monetary
expression of labour) are determined. The answer must of course be given in a
perspective which by definition see money as first of all endogenous finance,
and therefore it cannot but be opposed in any moment to the quantity theory of money.
On this there is of course another stark contrast with Moseley. Once the
priority of SNLT to MVA breaks down, it is clear that his determination of the
MELTp is nothing but the quantity theory once again, though in Marxian fashion.
The quantity identity cannot but rule, so MpV = PX, with P the general price
index and X the real output. With fixed V, and without bank finance in my
meaning, this identity becomes a theory only if the money supply is taken to be
exogenous. Moreover, since LL is taken as given and unaffected by money, the
monetary magnitudes are merely a veil of real analysis. Thus, with Mp
exogenous and X given by the results of production independently from
money, P is determined by the (exogenous) money supply. The only way out
from quantity theory could only be a Keynesian one, the variability of V, or the
sress only of money as store of value. This non-monetary theory of value would
 16
help in having a determination ex ante of the value of money only if LL is
something already existing, and (in some non-operational meaning)
measurable, before final exchange. Moseley’s way out is the recourse to SNLT as
the technical average, which cannot be accepted for the reasons explained
above.

8. The value of money: a non-fundamentalist research agenda

Once we leave the world of money as a commodity, however, and accept the
mathematical formulations of the New Interpretation on the ‘transformation’, as
I do, this determination of the MELT prior to final exchange no longer holds, at
the least in the meaning given by Moseley. This, however, creates a problem,
since it does not seem compatible with Marx’s inquiry about exploitation as
something which can be in some sense meaningfully defined ex-ante - that is,
before the market outcomes.
The Reuten’s position which I have criticized in paragraph 4, though wrong
as an interpretation of Marx, can be seen as a reconstruction of Marx that at least
has the merit to cut this Gordian knot. Reuten radically concludes for the
impossibility of maintaining a notion of abstract labour as something which
already exists in production, and that is measurable in labour time. His way out is
then to abolish the duality of dimensions – monetary and labour time – which was
at the heart of Marx’s project. It is amazing, in fact, that this (which wants to be
an) un-Ricardian perspective ends up in a very Ricardian (and anti-Marxian)
perspective according to which labour in production is only a host of concrete
labours which, though heterogeneous, can be added together as such. This
indeed would be, according to this author, the explanation of new value by
living labour as its source.
The opposite view I am putting forward against both Moseley and Reuten
assumes, to see how the MELT ex post, at the end of the circuit, comes into
being, that the expectations of banks, firms and workers are met. In the first phase of
the monetary capitalist circuit we can take as given the money wage bargained
by firms and trade unions on the labour market. The money wage bill (average
money wage multiplied for employment) must be equal to the amount the
workers need to buy the real subsistence wage, and the finance asked by firms to
banks allow them to buy a certain number of workers. Thus, even though the
credit money advanced by banks is without value, that finance correspond to a
very clearly defined amount of labour time: the labour time required to produce the
real wage goods for the working class, necessary labour. It is the labour-time
congealed in the means of subsistence for the number of workers bought at the
average daily wage. This is the first definition of the value of money: the value of
money as finance, strictly speaking.
Those workers are expected to give birth to a given amount of living labour,
which will be objectified in a certain amount of commodity-value to be sold at
expected prices. This is an ideal money sum. Even though the expected returns
are in itself, as paper money, without value, this is not so for the amount of
congealed labour in the commodity output. Here we have an ex-ante
determination of the value of money (as universal equivalent to be spent of the
 17
commodity market). This value-output, seen as crystal of labour, correspondent
to the expected money sum to be realized selling it, gives us the second definition
of the value of the money advanced by firms thanks to banks, the value of money
as capital. We are here in fact comparing the monetary expressions of the labour
time congealed in the commodity output with the labour congealed in the
money wage bill. If we assume that firms’ short-term expectations are met, the
ex ante MELT is also equal to the ex post MELT.
The same thing can be looked from the angle of the realized magnitudes, with
no assumption on the level of the real wage gained by the working class. Once
the real consumption of the working class is fixed, once the techniques are
given, and once the battle over the length and intensity of the working day is
ended, we have determined the total living labour expended and the total
necessary labour going into the commodities made available to workers: hence,
total surplus labour. These labour quantities are independent relative to the price
rule because - as long as exploitation and the consumption bundles are given -
they do not change. The only thing which happens with a change in prices is a
redistribution among individual capitals of the total direct labour exhibited by
money income, something which does not affect directly the fundamental class
relation.
In the end, of course, this reasoning converge with Foley’s ex-post,
observable MELT. In my reconstruction of Marx, influenced by TMC, it is fully
accepted that the “monetary expression of labour”, and then the “value of
money”, are only determined in the metamorphosis of commodities with the
universal equivalent on the commodity market. On this I side with Foley and
Reuten, as I understand them. The difference is that an attempt is done to put
some hypothesis on the macro working of the economy within an endogenous
bank-credit money system. In this approach the quantity of money supply is
determined by firms expectations, and hence also by their price and wage
expectations: not the other way round, as in Moseley. Crucial to this perspective
is indeed that capitalist production needs a monetary ante-validation. There is,
therefore, a ‘value of money’ as capital, relative to initial finance, which is distinct
and preliminary relative to the ‘value of money’ as the inverse of the MELT
In fact, these differences about the ‘value of money’ and the MELT go back to
the complexity of Marx’s notion of measure. As Fineschi (already quoted in
paragraph) has convincingly argued, in Marx: (i) socially necessary labour time
is what is immanently measured in the magnitude of value, and this is an objective
entity, though purely social, originating in production; (ii) the measuring act is not
possible ex ante but only ex post, within final exchange on the commodity
market (and this may affect the meaning of ‘socially necessary labour time’);
(iii) what measures socially necessary labour time in exchange, permitting to
know on the surface of society that socially objective magnitude whose
immanent dimension is labour, is money: the form of value which does not
coincide with what is measured.
My position adds that the measuring act ex post needs to be effected on a
magnitude of value which is already latently social as ideally anticipated money
(the Rubin point), and that this requires the monetary ante-validation by banks
(the TMC point). From here the introduction of a ‘value of money’ as capital –
 18
that is, money buying labour-power as source of living labour - before the ex post
determination of the MELT – that is, before money buying objectified labour.

9. The standpoint of Hegel

In his Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value Rubin wrote: «One cannot forget that, on
the question of the relation between content and form, Marx took the standpoint
of Hegel, and not of Kant. Kant treated form as something external in relation to
the content, and as something which adheres to the content from the outside.
From the standpoint of Hegel's philosophy, the content is not in itself
something to which form adheres from the outside. Rather, through its
development, the content itself gives birth to the form which was already latent in the
content. Form necessarily grows out of the content itself. This is a basic premise
of Hegel's and Marx's methodology, a premise which is opposed to Kant's
methodology. From this point of view, the form of value necessarily grows out
of the substance of value.»
This quote by Rubin is controversial. I think that there may be some
confusion here – e.g., in making abstract labour not only the ‘substance’ but also
the ‘content’ of value; or some ambiguity in saying that the content ‘gives birth’
to the form. And I do not want to engage in a discussion if he was or not
faithful to Hegel – probably not. All this notwithstanding, my strong
impression is that Rubin was into something, both about the interpretation of
what Marx was trying to do and about the suggestions of what had to be done in
the critique of political economy.
The point, as I insisted all along in this short paper, is that there is a dual
meaning in the reference to the form in relation to the content. The content, in a
sense, is already always form-determined. Commodities, as values, are a ghost-like
‘objectuality’, and nobody knows how to handle this value, until it is taking a
separate and autonomous form from the commodities themselves: money. It is only
when the opposition within the commodity becomes a real duality – value-as-
content duplicated by value-as-form – that Hegel’s ontological categories start to gain
actuality, and value begetting value becomes the instantiation of the Absolute Idea. We
pass from the embodiment of value – the ghost taking possession of a ‘material’ body
– to ‘value begetting value’, the valorization process – capital as a vampire, dead
labour sucking living labour, thus becoming an animated monster which begins
to work as if its body were by love possessed.
So, exactly when Hegelian ontology seems to come fully into being in
capitalist reality, it turns out that it depends crucially on its ability to exploit and
command labour. In this sense, when the ‘content’ is fully form-determined – that
is, when labour both as concrete and abstract is shaped by capital, the movement is as
Rubin portrays it: from the ‘content’ to the ‘form’. But to make that content really
form-determined, a monetary ante-validation is needed as a necessary logical
moment. To maintain both the value-form and abstract labour as essential
notions in the constitution and development of the concept of capital, Marxian
theory of value must be reconstructed as a macro-monetary theory of
exploitation along the lines proposed here.
 19

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